The PlayStation Vita has many apps available to it, and in the next couple weeks, Sony has promised a lot of new apps, from Hulu Plus to Redbox Instant.  There are certain apps, though, that are useful and efficient for things that certain types of people want.  For example, a review like myself can get some pretty good use out of apps pertaining to email, but more importantly, photos and screenshots.

As a reviewer, I am very attached to the Screenshot feature of the system, where you can press the Home and Start Buttons at the same time to take a screenshot of whatever is on the screen, savor backwards-compatible games and certain PS Vita games.  Utilizing these screenshots requires that I upload them to a photo-sharing service.  If it weren’t for some apps available on the Vita, this would be a very tricky process.

Thankfully, there is a very convenient app for the Vita that makes uploading screenshots to be used in reviews very easy.  The photo-sharing service Flickr has a PlayStation Vita app that I use almost every day.  For those out there that want to upload screens for reviews or simply to upload screenshots and photos, here is our official review of Flickr for the PlayStation Vita.

Functionality

Photo Apps don’t need a whole lot of functionality.  There are some social aspects to Photo-Sharing sites, but the main purpose of a Photo Sharing App is to upload photos so you can view them on the app or on a PC.  This app definitely does that, but it does a bit more than that.  When you first start up the app, there’s a pretty lengthy menu you can scroll down through.

As you scroll down, you will see a section for uploading photos.  This will let you either chooses photos from your Camera Roll, one at a time, to add to an Upload Queue.  You can also take a picture with the PlayStation Vita’s camera right then and there to upload.  Once you have all of the pictures in the queue that you want to upload, there is an Upload button you can press to upload them all at once.

There are also a few other sections.  The Explore section allows you to take a look at pictures the app and service create so you can find new users and new kinds of photos.  There is also a History section that shows you basically a history of what you have done with Flickr.  Is also an area where you can view your own Photostream, or go into your individual Photo Sets.

If you have any Friends on the Flickr system, you can also see a section there where you can view their photos.  There’s a fair amount to be able to do within the app, once you’re logged into your account.

Interface

As far as the design and Interface is concerned, the Flickr App is both simplistic and complex.  All of the menus are set up in the same way, which is pretty nice.  However, how they’re set up and placed make it pretty confusing to navigate before you really can get used to how it works.

Each Menu is a set of Square Boxes set up horizontally from the left side of the screen.  Each is comprised of 2-4 boxes and is set in sections, like Photostream, Uploads, Explore, and History.  Each of these menus are easy to navigate through.  However, the complexity comes with how large the overall Interface is.  It is a very tall interface, and you have to scroll and slide through a lot to see the entire interface.  It is like having to scroll down a really tall Web Page.  It works, but it is definitely an inconvenience and a chore to scroll, especially when you want to upload pictures, since that is towards the bottom of the interface.

The Menus and collections of Photos and Pictures are pretty easy to navigate through, once you open them.  They are listed like a grid and you can swipe in four ways to find the one you want.  Once you open them, you can also see the information, Delete it if you want, and look at other things, like comments people have made on each image.  There are also convenient buttons to go back to the previous screen as well as using the circle button to go back.

All in all, it’s not a bad interface, but it would have been a lot more convenient if everything was set in little shortcuts and didn’t require so much scrolling.

Performance

The performance of this app is hard to say in one statement.  This is because the app is a good app, but it’s also a not-so-good app.  There are certain things that it does really well and is really useful.  There are other things that it doesn’t do well at all and needs an update to fix.

Now, first of all, this app used to be full of glitching and crashing.  Back when this app had first come out, the app would crash when you did just about anything, even from just opening the app.  Since then, much of it has been fixed, thankfully.

When you go in and upload photos, everything normally goes without a hitch.  You just go through your images and select them, one at a time.  Then, when you select to upload the images, the images are uploaded pretty quickly.  I’d say each photo gets upload in an average of 3-4 seconds.  The app also makes a noise and pulls up a message to let you know they’re all uploaded.

Another positive part is that this app can run in the background and doesn’t register like a game does.  Some apps, like Facebook, cannot be open at the same time as a game.  Flickr, however, can run in the background and will not force you to close a game to be able to open it.

The bad part of the performance mostly comes from viewing images.  This used to be a huge problem with the entire app, but now it’s just to this.  I would say about 75% of the time when you open up an image to look at it, the app will crash and you will be asked to send a Report to the developers for improvement.  This is still a big problem, since it happens most of the time.  It’s not a killer for the app, though it is still a problem.

Overall

All in all, Flickr is a good app for uploading pictures.  It can upload images fairly quickly for you to use for a variety of ways.  However, an overly large interface and persistent crashing problems when viewing images can really bring down the convenience of the app.  If you’re just looking to upload pictures, then go for it.  But if you want to browse through photos, then you’re gonna have a bad time about 75% of the time.

The PlayStation Vita Review Network Rates Flickr a 6/10